[RFC 0/3] Add pause to empty spinloops
Stephen Hemminger
stephen at networkplumber.org
Wed Jan 21 19:05:41 CET 2026
On SMT systems, empty spinloops can cause excessive latency due to
the spinning core consuming resources that could be used by other
hardware threads. This series addresses this by adding rte_pause()
calls to busy-wait loops in the cnxk drivers.
The first two patches fix existing empty spinloops in the net/cnxk
and event/cnxk drivers. These were identified using a new coccinelle
script that finds variations of the pattern:
while (!atomic(&flag));
This is compile tested only! I don't have that hardware.
The third patch adds this coccinelle script to devtools/ so that
similar issues can be detected and fixed automatically across the
codebase.
The script handles multiple atomic API variants:
- Legacy rte_atomic*_read() functions
- C11 atomics via rte_atomic_load_explicit()
- GCC builtins via __atomic_load_n()
- Simple volatile variable checks
Stephen Hemminger (3):
net/cnxk: add pause to spinloops
event/cnxk: add pause to spinloops
devtools/cocci: add script to find empty spinloops
devtools/cocci/fix_empty_spinloops.cocci | 165 +++++++++++++++++++++++
drivers/event/cnxk/cn10k_worker.c | 2 +-
drivers/event/cnxk/cn20k_worker.c | 2 +-
drivers/event/cnxk/cnxk_tim_worker.h | 4 +-
drivers/net/cnxk/cn10k_tx.h | 4 +-
drivers/net/cnxk/cn20k_tx.h | 4 +-
6 files changed, 173 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 devtools/cocci/fix_empty_spinloops.cocci
--
2.51.0
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